Eighty-six years ago, the century was young and still relatively innocent—before World Wars, toxic waste dumps, and television commercials. At the end of March 1912 my father was born. Simultaneously, the most advanced product of human technology was preparing for her first venture to sea. So mighty was this new creation that she was named for the titans of old.
The Titanic’s maiden voyage, however, took her only as far as a rendezvous with a North Atlantic iceberg and then a slow descent more than two miles to the ocean floor. My dad was just over two weeks old when the ship sank in the early hours of 15 April 1912. For years afterward his mother observed that each anniversary of the sinking was numerically the same as that birthday of her oldest child. Grandmother is by now long gone, but, happily, Dad is still celebrating birthdays.
All this comes to mind with the recent release of a movie depicting the ship that acquired a lasting grip on the public psyche through the combination of her short life and the human drama involved in her sinking. Adjusting for inflation, producer-director James Cameron spent more to make the movie—$200 million versus $121 million in 1998 dollars— than White Star Line paid for the construction of the real ship.
Included in the movie’s production was the building of a model ship 88% of the size of the original and the creation of a lake that movie magic turned into a substitute for the Atlantic Ocean. The producer’s obsession with authenticity transports the audience back 86 years, giving viewers the sense that it is indeed again 1912 and they are on board the doomed liner.
The images on screen are likely to evoke memories for those who have enjoyed the experience of being at sea— the way low-hanging clouds are lit up by the setting orange sun; a clear night when the sky seems to be an overturned black bowl, pricked by thousands of holes that let in the starlight; the sound of water swishing along as the bow cuts through it; the leaping of porpoises in front of the advancing ship; the expanse of wooden decking topside; the feeling of salt air blowing through one’s hair and gluing clothes against the skin.
In the interior are still more images. They give the viewer a sense—far better than the printed page or still photos can—of the life and death of a great liner. Museums can show us pictures of a reciprocating steam engine. In Titanic, one sees the up-and-down working of the giant piston rods. In the fireroom stokers pitch coal into the fiery maws of boilers, a way of life that the first-class passengers never saw but without which they could not have crossed the sea.
The theater-goer also sees the contrast between accommodations for the people in first class and the passengers in steerage. And one sees the difference in manners as well for those separated by the layers of the rigid British class system.
But after the liner’s collision with the ice, the steadily rising water carries with it a sense of foreboding for all those— rich and poor—who knew they were doomed but could not escape their collective fate.
Cameron uses an engaging device to move the viewer from the 1990s to 1912—the recollections of a fictitious character named Rose, who survived the sinking and is still alive all these years later. Taken by helicopter to an oceanographic research ship poised above the wreck of the Titanic, Rose holds the crew of the research ship spellbound by her descriptions of the all-too-brief ocean voyage so long ago. Cameron’s camera intercuts neatly between the ghostly images of the actual wreck and his intricately crafted reproductions for the movie set.
The actress playing the part of the over-100 survivor is Gloria Stuart, who in reality is now 87. A quick click on the Internet reveals that Stuart has been in 53 films in a career spanning the years from 1932 to 1997. One of those pictures was Warner Brothers’ Here Comes the Navy, in which she starred with Pat O’Brien and James Cagney. Filmed on board the battleship USS Arizona (BB-39) in 1934, it was a romantic comedy set against the routines of shipboard life. Stuart—a cute, good-natured blonde—charmed Cagney into cleaning up his act and being a good sailor. As the white-haired survivor of the ocean liner, she dispenses both humor and tragedy in recounting the events of April 1912.
In the 20th century, perhaps no other ships have acquired as much mystique as the Titanic and the Arizona because of the dramatic, symbolic ways in which they died. The former showed that the “unsinkable” ship was vulnerable to nature. The latter demonstrated, in one thunderous explosion, that the battleship had lost pride of place among naval vessels. It is intriguing that the same actress had central roles in movies made more than 60 years apart about these two ships. Both the liner and the battleship are still objects of interest today, long after their contemporaries have disappeared from the seas.